1. Field of Art
The invention generally relates to the field of data communication networks and in particular to dynamically determining how many network packets to process before switching to a different task.
2. Background Information
Network appliances that process and forward network traffic (e.g., packets) are often responsible for performing additional tasks. These tasks include, for example, tasks offloaded from other servers (e.g., compression, inter-process communication (IPC), remote procedure calls (RPC), and encryption such as secure sockets layer (SSL)) and housekeeping tasks (e.g., timer processing and statistics collection). Processing and forwarding network traffic is resource-intensive. If too many CPU cycles are allocated to network traffic tasks, then the offloaded tasks and housekeeping tasks will suffer, ultimately resulting in an overall decline in performance.